English Summer by Raymond Chandler

The place appeared suddenly, down the slope from a wide, grassy circle, which was supposed to be what remained of a Roman camp. Down the slope was Lakeview, which, characteristically, had no view of the lake.

It lay in an utterness of neglect you don't see in England, in a jungle of tangled vines, a wilderness of long, weed-grown lawns. Even the sunken garden had become a pit of shame. Grass grew almost knee high on the Elizabethan bowling lawn at the side. The house itself was a lovely time-darkened red brick, in the traditional Elizabethan form, with outward jutting, heavily leaded windows. Fat spiders slept behind them like bishops, and their webs mottled the glass, and they gazed out somnolently where once the hawk-faced dandies in slashed doublets had looked out at England, unappeased, in their furious days, by its cloistered charm.